Thursday, July 24, 2014

Reimagineering the World

So, I think we might have stumbled upon what is perhaps the key to it all: the imagination. Unfortunately, that word has the wrong connotations for most people -- like the word "myth" to which it is related, people imagine that imagination is cognate to fantasy or daydreaming or to the academic onanism of infertile eggheads.

But in point of fact, if we remove imagination from the equation, we end up with... an equation -- a cutandryasdust quantitative world devoid of real qualities. Really. Physics is the paradigmatic science for the reductioneers of modernity and below, which means that anything that can't be quantified isn't really real; the world, in the words of Whitehead, is reduced to "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.”

In the article referenced in yesterday's post, Bellow writes of how the left not only has a stranglehold on the cultural imagination, but also keeps out competitors with its "reactionary humorlessness, its bullying tone, and its impulse to dictate what people may and may not say." Taken to the extreme -- as in 1984 -- people are deprived even of the means "to express dissenting views, or even to formulate thoughts that might inform such intellectual resistance."

Not too long ago it was nearly impossible for conservative ideas to get a hearing in the liberal barkingplace of dogma. Here again, the left had so successfully reduced the scope of reality that reality itself was excluded. Thanks to talk radio, the internet, and a thriving market for serious books, this is no longer the case.

However, as Bellow says, "The real problem is that we may have reached the limit of what facts and reasoned argument can do." That is, it doesn't seem to matter that the left "cannot win the argument on its merits" so long as it prevails on the cultural front. We simply cannot "debate and argue this incipient totalitarian movement out of existence."

That made sense to me when I first read it, but now I'm not so sure, for what are we to do about the millions of people who have lost the argument but don't know it? We are all familiar with the "density" of the liberal mind, how impervious it is to fact and reason. Those people are not going to be converted through a soul-stirring book or film.

Indeed, there was a recent kerfuffle over an airhead at MSNBC who claimed that Animal Farm is really a fable about capitalist greed! This demonstrates how you can lead a liberal to imaginative intellectual water but cannot make her think.

Likewise the massive electoral base of the left, the dependent and ineffectual LoFo hordes living in the philistinian territories. I am slowly coming to the realization that the problem here is not Low Information but Low IQ. In other words, we are dealing with a pearl-swine issue. The swine don't know much, but they do know they can vote themselves more Free Pearls, and I don't see how this can be reversed with the swords of imagination or information.

Our constitution was designed to protect us from two things: from the state and from the mob. But the mob now has the state (and vice versa), so it seems to me that in the long run we might be *fucked*. Look at how the domestic mob is encouraging the foreign mob at the border. Who benefits? The transnational mob.

Until quite recently, I believed that human beings actually wanted freedom. Indeed, a big part of my support for the Iraq war was due to the mistaken belief that liberty is a universal value, and that as soon as Muslims tasted it, well, the tyrants would eventually fall like demonoes. Mea maxima stupida.

What is again a little odd -- or at least in need of explanation -- is how my generation somehow went from freewheeling libertarianism to the cramped statism of the illiberal left. Then again, this assumes some special virtue in my generation, as if it was not heir to all the usual ego trips and fallies of man. Once it gained a taste of power, the rest followed mechanically.

As Bellow observes, "The original counterculture -- that is, before it was hijacked and turned into a vehicle for progressive politics -- was actually libertarian in spirit." "[W]hat made it work was its antic humor," and "its willingness to flout the sacred cows" of the establishment.

But "nothing like that has been seen in this country for decades, precisely because the culture is now dominated by sanctimonious liberals who have lost the capacity to laugh at themselves." Which is why we have to laugh twice as hard at them in order to make up the difference.

Bellow speaks of the need for a new rebellion from outside and from "below." Yes, but the problem there is that these two must be unified in a rebellion from above. To rebel from below is to rebel for its own sake, or for the usual base human motives of envy, greed, favor, and libido dominandi. But the American revolution -- the neverending vertical revolution -- is a revolution from above. This is the real target of the counter-revolutionaries of the left, and we see it in a multitude of ways.

For example, the creation of an oxymoronic "living constitution" is the quickest way to kill the constitution. Likewise, as we saw with the recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals, if the ObamaCare law doesn't mean what it says, then it means both nothing and anything, depending upon the needs of the state. In other words, power determines truth, which is the essence of the pneumapathology of the left.

So, how does imagination displace power? Seems to me that this is part of the story of Christianity, as the imaginative wisdom of the yeast works its way through the undifferentiated lump of worldly power.

48 comments:

Until quite recently, I believed that human beings actually wanted freedom. Indeed, a big part of my support for the Iraq war was due to the mistaken belief that liberty is a universal value, and that as soon as Muslims tasted it, well, the tyrants would eventually fall like demonoes.

It wasn't just you. In fact, I think it's fair to say that most of the Americans who supported the war believed the same at the time. We didn't realize just how weird we are for wanting to be free.

I do believe, though, that had we the will, the support, and the long view, given enough time we could have seen Iraq and other parts of the Middle East come around to freedom. Trouble is, it would take several generations and a willingness, in the meantime, to act in a somewhat imperial fashion, which of course goes against the American grain.

Yep. Because, just as the post demonstrates, I don't see how we could fail to screw it all up during that time. Perhaps I should have said, if we were perfect, had perfect plans, and could execute them flawlessly, it might have worked. Or in other words, nice theory, wrong species.

I am slowly coming to the realization that the problem here is not Low Information but Low IQ. In other words, we are dealing with a pearl-swine issue. The swine don't know much, but they do know they can vote themselves more Free Pearls, and I don't see how this can be reversed with the swords of imagination or information.

No, I think it has to be attacked via culture. It used to be that the average person would rather starve than take the government cheese. Eventually, all stigma was removed as well as much in the way of conditions for getting handouts, so now for a significant percentage of the population, it's considered a valid lifestyle choice. Or rather, in terms of life's necessities, it's considered a right.

Again, effecting significant change requires a long view - just as the culture was undermined systematically by an assortment of programs meant to shape the minds of America's children, so too is it theoretically possible to rebuild that foundation in future generations.

Bellow writes of how the left not only has a stranglehold on the cultural imagination, but also keeps out competitors with its "reactionary humorlessness, its bullying tone, and its impulse to dictate what people may and may not say." Taken to the extreme -- as in 1984 -- people are deprived even of the means "to express dissenting views, or even to formulate thoughts that might inform such intellectual resistance."

Heh - I'm reminded of our new troll and his complaints that we're anti-intellectual for not wanting to read Sontag. And yet, I can't imagine he'd be any more open-minded about reading, say, Prager, or Murray, or Sowell, much less giving them an honest chance.

The point in Animal Farm isn't capitalism versus communism. Orwell, after all, was a disillusioned socialists. (May Obama make more of those.) It's about that fact that the manipulative and ruthless will gain control in the absence of the rule of law.

If you don't stick with the rule of law then everything becomes an exception, for a good cause, and it gets twisted to serve the purposes of the fascist government-corporate complex.

There's a law governing how people from foreign countries are allowed to enter this country, and there is a legitimate reason, based in national security, health, and safety for that law. So you get "children" massed at the border, and we have to ignore the law for reasons of compassion.

That's a manipulation of imagination right there. All that news imagery completely divorced from the reality that we are being invaded by a hostile force of pillagers.

Those folks can thank whatever god they believe in that I'm not governor of Texas.

how my generation somehow went from freewheeling libertarianism to the cramped statism of the illiberal left

But didn't those freewheelers freely wheel because their Squaresville dads bankrolled it? They would've been off to Nam or Plastics, Inc. otherwise. They needed Dad, making him both necessary and repugnant. Then Mom and Dad divorced in 68, and the parent operation turned into a State that would both support and bankroll every whim. Or else.

- Video that shows people walking around amid ghosts (the past) of every description, especially the relatives of the characters themselves.- Portraits of thriving local communities that solve problems on their own and don't need, or want, money from the federal government.- Evil coming to a bad end, often defeated directly by the good.- Children who want to learn from adults.- Adults who don't want to be like children.- Troubled marriages in which the spouses learn to become happy and functional.

"So, I think we might have stumbled upon what is perhaps the key to it all: the imagination."

'Zactly so.

"The swine don't know much, but they do know they can vote themselves more Free Pearls, and I don't see how this can be reversed with the swords of imagination or information."

Well... you've got to catch their imagination, in order to do it. Unfortunately 'The Right' seems to think this means either reciting the wonders of our Founding Fathers, or animated cartoons of them singing the Bill of Rights to Hip Hop.

Doesn't work. Not because the lo fo's are impervious to imagination, but because such approaches have none, and so have no appeal to lo fo's, da youts, or anyone else. Not sure if I mentioned it here or not, but I took our two youngest, Chad (21) & Rachel (15) to see D'Souza's 'America'. It was good, was well done, it did a good job of answering the charges against America and raising the Red flags... but. Aside from Chad & Rachel, I was the youngest one in the theater. That's not good. And it isn't going to get better with more of the same.

They acknowledged a few tidbits of political and historical trivia... but they won't be raving about it to their friends, and it wouldn't interest them to go see it if they did. Sad, but a fact. There was one moment where it almost did what needs to be done, where U2's Bono was talking about 'the idea of America' - and it wasn't that Bono was saying it, but what he was saying - he caught their imagination, not with 'saturated' references to things done, but to what really can fire the imagination - but it was brief and gone too quick.

They both thought it was 'good', but as Chad said "Like any other movie or political ad, they pitch the music behind the words at the right moment, cut to the right images and produce the desired effect." That's not what's going to win new and expanding demographics.

It got the 'challenge of our age' right, that being the restoration of America... but that isn't going to happen by selling the same old message in the same old way.

We, and I'm looking at me here especially, can't use tales of the Founders or even of America, to fire the imagination - the story has been killed. It just has. We've got to figure out a way to do, what John Adams did - Create America without reference to glorious past... that is past.

"Until quite recently, I believed that human beings actually wanted freedom. Indeed, a big part of my support for the Iraq war was due to the mistaken belief that liberty is a universal value,..."

I still think it is. The problem comes in with this next part:

"... and that as soon as Muslims tasted it, well, the tyrants would eventually fall like demonoes. Mea maxima stupida."

No noooo and NooOOOoooo. No workee. A similar point can be made by saying "I thought food and shelter and a prosperous happy family were universal values", and that is true, they are. The problem comes in with thinking that that thinking so is enough thinking to bring it about. It ain't. To have food & shelter and a prosperous happy family, requires, first, an image of what that would be. And in order to move that image out of dream land, requires understanding what they are and what they require, and putting in the effort to bring them about and maintain them.

That's more difficult. And that's why the poor will always be with us. And the Iraqies.

Iraq was irremediably doomed to failure, if not from the start, then when Bush & Co. decided to 'work with' the Iraqies and 'help them' agree on a constitution. When I heard that was the plan, I said NOOOoooooooooooooo........!!!!!.... For them to have a shred of a chance, they had to not only let go of 'what works for them', the very notion had to be obliterated and made a shameful, and dangerous, thought. Post WWII Japan was and is the only possible model (and the least workable form of it... just barely workable, regarding law, Natural Law, Rights, etc.).

Everybody wants freedom.

Very few want to bother with what it requires to establish a culture and a system where Liberty can thrive.

It has to be understood what it is, what it requires, and the sort of life you have to live in order to bring it about. As long as stoning someone to death over a fashion choice, or who they kissed, is an option, none of that is going to happen. Just ain't.

I supported the Iraq wars and Iraqi reconstruction and still do, though it has all failed. Bush & Co.'s gamble was that we'd be able to put a beachhead for western freedom smack dab in the middle of the Middle East. It happened before in Persia and Turkey more or less. If we didn't take Saddam seriously, we'd have to suffer continued attacks from states that incubate jihad. Look at Gaza.

But yes, agreed that Mohammad had too powerful a hold on too many of their imaginations. I bet Cheney knew the whole thing was doomed, but sometimes you roll the dice. When Obama & Bros. purposely f*cked up the post-surge, the bad guys saw opportunity and took it again. At this point, I say we just monitor and wreck the bad guy camps as needed. Any evidence jihadi's are using camps in Iraq to hurt the US? Bombs away. No boots.

I don't know, Van. Turner had it right when he wrote that early on we had the benefit of a frontier to exercise ourselves against. Nations rise and fall and have their arc. I think we're headed for fleshpot city-states wired together by a global technocratic elite. Their power will be looser in the provinces, which will be more natural, rougher, and accordingly more moral. I know where I'll be, if I make it that far.

Magister said "Turner had it right when he wrote that early on we had the benefit of a frontier to exercise ourselves against."

But at that point we understood ourselves and who we were, and we had the idea of being an American to advance from. Those who went into the wilderness did not have a wilderness within them, they had a living image afire within to sustain them through all that they didn't fully understand.

And that was only possible, IMHO, because of the decades of work that Sam Adams put in (beginning in 1740's,and which others joined in with soon after), not just calling people out as materialist slackers (which most colonists were, to the extent that raw nature would allow such a thing), but fired them up with what they could, and should, be.

The one big plus in our favor, that Adams didn't have, is that we don't have to re-imagine a govt that can foster liberty, we just have to reassert it.

The one big plus Adams had in his favor, that we've nearly lost, was the dominance of Grecco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture.

That lack is a big hurdle to progress.

"Nations rise and fall and have their arc."

Yes there is, but what the downward side of that arc consists of, is important to note: they lose their story. At no time in the past was it possible for the people to retrieve the story their elite's had lost. It certainly wasn't possible for a people to retrieve and review, the ideas, concepts and stories that had gone into creating their society, let alone have even the possibility to rewrite them for their own time.

For the first time in all of history, the failed elites can't keep the people separated from what made them possible in the first place.

And if We The People decide to follow the elites down, then, yeah, the fleshpot city-states are where we'll continue to head for. But they won't be wired together by a global technocratic elite, not for long anyway, such a system requires a people of trust and integrity and virtue - aka: an Economy - and will collapse without it, as it is has in the past and as we are moving towards now.

"Until quite recently, I believed that human beings actually wanted freedom. Indeed, a big part of my support for the Iraq war was due to the mistaken belief that liberty is a universal value, and that as soon as Muslims tasted it, well, the tyrants would eventually fall like demonoes. Mea maxima stupida."

I still think most people wanna be free. The problem is that most of those people don't want anyone else to have liberty that is different from them.

In the case of most Muslims, if you don't believe exactly like they do you don't deserve one iota of freedom or even your life.This is why Different sects of Islam are always at war with each other.

Like those ontheleft, they can't tolerate anyone who doesn't whole-headly embrace their cult.The only exeptionisthey will temporarily be allies with the enemy of their enemy (and it seems everyone's enemy these days are folks who lovethe truth, love life, liberty, and the pursuitof happiness).

As we all know, the Jihadists will make short workof those on the left as soon as the liberty lovers are completely out of power and are no longer a major defense hurdle.

So, essentially, most people want freedom as long they are in charge and they are the ones who dispense it, although their form of freedom is actually not freedomat all but a grotesque perversion of it, ie slavery.

Excuse me if someone else already said this (haven't read all the comments yet).

I think we're headed for fleshpot city-states wired together by a global technocratic elite. Their power will be looser in the provinces, which will be more natural, rougher, and accordingly more moral.

I don't know that I'll live to see that, but that's what I'm planning for, for the grandkids. It's always, "If trends continue ...", the bogeyman of all predictive models. That's where the arrows seem to be pointing at the moment.

Ok, story: discovery, independence, republic, expansion, empire, decadence, and ruin. The estate is crumbling. The barbarians have entered. The house is divided.

Maybe Odysseus is about to arrive, maybe Fortinbras. Penelope however is confused. Gertrude has money and power. Ophelia is mad, not yet dead, and lots of friends. Van, you remind me of Laertes (I mean that as a compliment).

Fortinbras came back to internal strife and suicide. Odysseus returned and slew every suitor. Which is more likely? Are they the only options? I tend to these are European fates and that America can escape such cycles. There was some rebirth with Reagan, and like you, I'll go down trying to make it happen. The kids are key.

You said it, Ben. It'll happen if enough of us turn the imaginations of the young men and women around us. We can best do that by example, by being close to what they should imagine. We don't need to be perfect, and probably shouldn't be: they should feel like they could step in and finish that job. The problem is scale. Are there enough of us? The statists have constructed this huge house of horrors. Can we dismantle enough of it to give our kids a shot?

So, I think we might have stumbled upon what is perhaps the key to it all: the imagination. Unfortunately, that word has the wrong connotations for most people -- like the word "myth" to which it is related, people imagine that imagination is cognate to fantasy or daydreaming or to the academic onanism of infertile eggheads.

I'm glad you mentioned that because a few months(?) ago we were discussing that "bad" type of imagination and I wondering if you would make that distinction.

Hell, some of them want to *be* stubble. They expect to be thrown into the fire, thus the tattoos because it's all going to be tossed anyway. May as well assert your material self while you can. More or less. My SIL put a discreet tattoo on her ankle to be hip enough for her betrothed, who has a fair number of them. They voted for Obama twice. They're a nice couple otherwise but could only bear to have one child. They hoped he would be an artist and encouraged his long hair until he couldn't stand it anymore and had it all cut off. No tattoos on the boy yet. They go occasionally to an Episcopal church because it makes them feel a positional good ("be nice to gays"), and the boy has expressed no spiritual desire, not that I've heard, anyway. They have evangelical relatives who love and care for them, so their rebellion is careful, selective, and discreet. I think there are a lot of these people, maybe more numerous than the horde that Dalrymple describes. They can be reached.

Magister said "The estate is crumbling. The barbarians have entered. The house is divided."

Well, if not actually divided yet, dividing, certainly, leaving us somewhere between decadence and ruin. It is still possible to halt and begin again... not real likely, granted, but possible, which is the stuff dreams are made of.

"Van, you remind me of Laertes (I mean that as a compliment). "

lol, you presented two ways to take that, I'm trying to imagine the complimentary one to take that. I suppose, from Hamlet's view, after killing Laertes, he died well. ;-) But from Odysseus's view, returning to his father Laertes who failed to defend Penelope... ouch, I'm afraid that does fit.

"Maybe Odysseus is about to arrive..."

Yes. But arrive where? Troy or Ithaca? Maybe both at the same time? That seems to be more like our situation. We are in the odd situation of battling to invade and defend against ourselves, and poor Telemachus has got even more choices to make now than ever before.

I like this comment you made yesterday, Van, particularly concerning people like our present troll who don't know the difference between a right and a desire, or even what a right IS:

"Rights, Individual Rights, are not granted by powers, but derived from the realities of human nature, and can only be upheld and defended through power being subordinated to Natural Law - they are not something that can be granted."

It goes without saying, and I know you have said it before, since rights cannot be granted they cannot be taken away and ought to be considered sacrosanct and elemental be because the truth of rights will never change.

So here we are and the state is attempting to take away our rights that the state has never given to begin with.

This is gonna be a helluva fight and I pray for the same courage and wisdom our Founders had. No matter what happens Raccoons won't go quietly into that dark night I tell you what.

Likewise the massive electoral base of the left, the dependent and ineffectual LoFo hordes living in the philistinian territories. I am slowly coming to the realization that the problem here is not Low Information but Low IQ. In other words, we are dealing with a pearl-swine issue. The swine don't know much, but they do know they can vote themselves more Free Pearls, and I don't see how this can be reversed with the swords of imagination or information.

Wasn't someone just yesterday saying that the left was really elitist, because high-wealth districts tend to vote Democratic? Or IOW, if you so smart, why ain't you rich?

Interesting parallel on the individual level - I've came to a realization recently regarding my own quest for virtue that imagination is the key to better behavior without expending will power (which is severely limited). The beast like side of me gravitates towards eating the doughnut mindlessly. I feel drawn and attracted to the image, conjured by the imagination, of an identity of one who does not eat a doughnut mindlessly. That feeling in turn diminishes the ape like longing for deep fried sugar and dough. I no longer need the doughnut.

What About Bob?

Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!

Goround ZerO:

The Cosmic Area Rug:

The empty center is Beyond-Being. The circles are dimensions of Being. Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones.

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Fuck You: War

Late last night, in search of light, I watched a ball of fire streak across the midnight sky. I watched it glow, then grow, then shrink, then sink into the silhouette of morning. As I watched it die, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot in common with that light.’ That’s right. I’m alive with the fire of my life, which streaks across my span of time and is seen by those who lift their eyes in search of light to help them though the long, dark night. --Nilsson

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